Mint.com gets facelift, new financial management guides

Mint.com is a useful web-based financial aggregation product, but you may not …

Financial aggregation service Mint.com will launch a redesign today aimed at making the site's features more accessible. The site has launched a number of features since opening up to the public in September 2007, and the company hopes that a major facelift and new financial management guides will turn more visitors into registered users.

As a competitor to incumbents like Quicken, Mint.com is an entirely web-based aggregation tool that lets users plug in checking, savings, credit card, investment, and loan accounts and visualize all of their finances. We use the term "aggregation" because, for now, Mint.com doesn't allow users to perform financial management actions, like pay upcoming bills or move money between accounts. That said, the site does offer a number of unique features, such as automatic analysis of one's finances to find ways to save money (e.g., transferring balances to a credit card with a lower interest rate), and customizable e-mail or SMS alerts for certain activity, like unusual spending or upcoming bill due dates. Mint.com provides its services for free due to revenue brought in from bank and credit card affiliate programs, and everything is kept encrypted and even anonymous, which the company explains in its privacystatements.

Mint.com has launched a slew of new features over the last year, including investment tracking, budgeting tools, and loan (even student loan) tracking. As a relatively green site (pun intended), however, Mint.com's new features, and even their announcements, haven't been very obvious to both current and potential users. The company hopes to remedy that problem with today's redesign.

The new Mint.com features a much lighter, more organized layout that better highlights its various features, and especially the new ones launched in recent months. The site goes a bit beyond simply letting users keep track of their checking and savings balances, and the new design makes this much more apparent.

Along with the redesigned site, Mint.com has also introduced six new "how to" guides that cover key financial decisions and responsibility. The new guides cover the topics of reducing credit card debt, saving for retirement, paying off student loans, saving money while dining out, buying a car, and creating a budget. These should make Mint.com a much more appealing destination for both financial aggregation and learning how to save money and get more responsible with one's finances.

As we've said in the past, though, Mint.com's utility and appeal only go so far, due to a lack of actual financial management features. A few of the Ars staff have used Mint.com for some time now, but we would much rather have seen even a basic set of bill-paying or money-shuffling features than some shiny new product pages and financial responsibility guides (though the guides certainly don't hurt). Mint.com has a lot of potential for becoming a financial aggregator and management tool, but until those features arrive, the site's growth likely won't be much to talk about.